Events

I was a panellist at an event held in UCD in March titled Digital Landscapes, where along with fellow panelists Damien Mulley, Kim Majerus and Dylan Collins, we discussed current and future trends in the online world. In preparation for the event, the panel chair, Damien McLoughlin, emailed a number of questions which I am reproducing below along with my answers.

When we talk about exploiting new technology: what technology are we talking about? What opportunities do they present? What are these emerging technologies that everyone is talking about?

New technology could be anything - augmented reality, 3-D video, WiMax, the Semantic Web, real-time information streams - and they all become relevant in a world where technologies are becoming increasing integrated in our everyday lives - phones are not just used for phoning and texting, but for e-mailing, browsing the Web, setting one's PVR, controlling devices around the home, retrieving context-specific information, e.g. by geolocation, time, social connectivity, etc.

What impact will digital technology have on our lives now and in the future?

Nicole Ellison works at Michigan State University, and primarily looks at the links between online and offline communication processes, building on her background in communications. Much of her data collection is performed through surveys and interviews, but she uses both qualitative and quantitative methods having also done work on server-level data. When she began researching interaction in social media, she thought it might be more useful to highlight the things she brings as an outsider and provide insights from a communications perspective, looking at how processes change over time. For this, its critical to really understand the online context in which online data is produced. She says that its an extremely exciting time for examining social media, but interpretation is critical.

"We" is a complex word. It often means "you". As in when I'm talking to my students, "We need to analyze this data". — Pennebaker

Jamie Pennebaker, a professor from the University of Texas at Austin, is a social psychologist who has become fascinated with the nature of words and language. He spoke at the Weblogs and Social Media conference in DC today. The premise is that the words we use in everyday language, whether written or spoken, reflect who we are - our personality, our relationship with others - they are a window to us as a being.

As background, 20 years ago, Pennebaker was involved in research dealing with mind-body issues. He was intrigued with traumatic experiences and health problems, and the phenomenon of a secret trauma which served as a risk factor for illness. He wondered: what if we asked people to reveal secrets, to talk or write about them, and would there be a positive effect on their health. Some students were brought in to write about traumatic experience or superficial topics. When asked to write about traumas, and some had profoundly disturbing stories, their physical health improved. They also checked (through blood tests) their immune systems, and found that the students had a better immune function after writing about their experiences. There have been about 200 studies since then about expressive writing and health.

Late on 23rd February, I answered a tweet from @johnbreslin and scored myself a free ticket to the Digital Festival taking place in Dublin the next day. With an impressive line-up of speakers, clearly not the usual ones dragged out for digital events this side of the Irish Sea, I was very pleased with myself.

Sadly the Digital Festival did not live up to expectations.

My take on it is because the festival organisers did not work hard enough on briefing their world-class speakers. I’d go so far as to surmise that they didn’t brief them at all. I think they booked them, gave them a topic, then left it at that. The result was that:

Blaine Cook, formerly of Twitter, gave a talk about some of the elements of the Social Web that he thinks are particularly important, including networks of niche communities and real-time topic-centric content.

He started off by telling us to close our eyes, and imagine we were in a big room: in one corner is your mom, in another is your boss, in another is your football team, your ex-wife, your girlfriend, and so on, and everyone in the room now knows everyone else in the room. We should be horrified by such a scenario, but this is Facebook.